Speir verb to ask a question, inquire, make inquiries, etc.
‘“Robin McGillivray came to call upon me this morning, to speir for my Elizabeth, to be pledged to his lad, Manfred.”’ (The Fiery Cross)
Despite the similarities, speir is not some sort of Scotticised variant of the word spear. It instead derives from Old English spyrian and its Old Norse counterpart spyrja, which were both employed in various related senses including ‘to ask about’ and ‘to investigate’. It appears in some of the earliest examples of Scots literature, including John Barbour’s epic poem The Bruce (1375): ‘He had wonder quhat it mycht be, And on sic maner spyryt he That he knew that it wes the king’.
In modern and historical Scots, speir is often followed by prepositions like ‘at’ and ‘to’. Another early example occurs in King James VI’s Daemonologie (1597), a treatise on witchcraft: ‘In what I can, that ye like to speir at me, I will willinglie and freelie tell my opinion’.
Specific uses of the word have also developed over time. One example is the sense of proposing marriage, illustrated by the following rather plaintive extract from James C Dibdin’s Border Life (1897): ‘Ye wadna speir at me, though I wad rather had you a thoosand times ... ’.
Asking riddles is the same as speirin guesses and if you speired someone’s price you would be asking them to name their terms (usually for work). John Lockhart records this one in Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott (1837): ‘Scott said … mimicking the air and tone of a Highland lass waiting at the cross of Edinburgh to be hired for the harvest work, “We’ve stood here an hour by the Tron, hinny, and diel a ane has speered our price”.’ Typical derivatives like speirer are also well attested, as in Robin Jenkins’ novel The Thistle and the Grail (1954): ‘she might say that to her faither … He’s the speirer in this family; he’s the one that likes to ken what’s going on.’
Finally, Christina Forbes Middleton’s Doric poem The Dance in the Village (1981) catches a very recognisable snippet of mother-daughter interaction: ‘Fin ma mither spiers fit I’ve been up tae I can safely divulge ma plans An’ look her straicht in the face an’ say: “I wis only haudin’ HANS!”’